that Mohammed’s successors in the guidance of his community, by continuing their expansion towards the north, after the suppression of the apostasy that followed his death, remained in Mohammed’s line of action.  There is even more evident continuity in the development of the empire of the Omayyads out of the state of Mohammed, than in the series of events by which we see the dreaded Prince-Prophet of Medina grew out of the “possessed one” of Mecca.  But if Mohammed had been able to foresee how the unity of Arabia, which he nearly accomplished, was to bring into being a formidable international empire, we should expect some indubitable traces of this in the Qoran; not a few verses of dubious interpretation, but some certain sign that the Revelation, which had repeatedly, and with the greatest emphasis, called itself a “plain Arabic Qoran” intended for those “to whom no warner had yet been sent,” should in future be valid for the ’Ajam, the Barbarians, as well as for the Arabs.

Even if we ascribe to Mohammed something of the universal program, which the later tradition makes him to have drawn up, he certainly could not foresee the success of it.  For this, in the first place, the economic and political factors to which some scholars of our day would attribute the entire explanation of the Islam movement, must be taken into consideration.  Mohammed did to some extent prepare the universality of his religion and make it possible.  But that Islam, which came into the world as the Arabian form of the one, true religion, has actually become a universal religion, is due to circumstances which had little to do with its origin.[1] This extension of the domain to be subdued to its spiritual rule entailed upon Islam about three centuries of development and accommodation, of a different sort, to be sure, but not less drastic in character than that of the Christian Church.

[Footnote 1:  Sir William Muir was not wrong when he said:  “From first to last the summons was to Arabs and to none other...  The seed of a universal creed had indeed been sown; but that it ever germinated was due to circumstances rather than design.”]

II

THE RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF ISLAM

We can hardly imagine a poorer, more miserable population than that of the South-Arabian country Hadramaut.  All moral and social progress is there impeded by the continuance of the worst elements of Jahiliyyah (Arabian paganism), side by side with those of Islam.  A secular nobility is formed by groups of people, who grudge each other their very lives and fight each other according to the rules of retaliation unmitigated by any more humane feelings.  The religious nobility is represented by descendants of the Prophet, arduous patrons of a most narrow-minded orthodoxy and of most bigoted fanaticism.  In a well-ordered society, making the most of all the means offered by modern technical science, the dry barren soil might be made